


The Golden Rod

by archea2



Category: Bridgerton (TV)
Genre: Bisexual Female Character, Bisexual Male Character, Costume Parties & Masquerades, Drawing, F/M, Flirting, Hand & Finger Kink, Light Dom/sub, Romance, Spanking, Unconventional Relationship, they understand each other so well
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-14 23:35:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29426817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/archea2/pseuds/archea2
Summary: This assumed guidance, this firmness of steer, was how Genevieve and Lucy had won him over two months ago. Now Benedict was letting a woman in a long scarlet cloak, a scarlet mask and a golden devil’s prong engage him in a minuet.
Relationships: Benedict Bridgerton/Lady Danbury
Comments: 12
Kudos: 21
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 6





	The Golden Rod

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LamiaCalls](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LamiaCalls/gifts).



The Opera House masquerade was full of glee and candlelight when Benedict joined it; the candle flames joining hands overhead, where the gilded mirrors flashed them back in a bright golden haze. He felt easy at once. This was no bread-and-butter ball such as poor Eloise had to endure on her maiden journey to marriage, no - this was the stuff of fun. Benedict, who never danced at the public balls if he could help it, glanced down at the central expanse of floor, still covered in arabesques of rose-pink chalk. The pattern would be danced away by dawn; now at eleven it was mostly intact and quite lovely to behold, despite the dancers’ effort to use the chalk for purchase while stamping it with abandon.

No need to seek out a Master of Ceremonies for an introduction. Dances fell away and surged anew. Gentlemen left the ladies for a sir, or vice versa; ladies adieu’d their partners for a sip of negus or a cool crisp slice of tattle. A general good time was being had, if the smiling masks were to be trusted. 

Benedict slipped his own visor - patterned with bees all over, as was his cloak - over his face. He felt an explorer at heart: Genevieve’s letter from Paris had come at last, letting him know in no certain terms that she might, or might not, cross the Channel again, and that meanwhile he was free to make as pleasant use of his time as she was. She had added, one of those soft-sharp grace notes he’d savoured in her, “Never shed a tear over me, so I can always think of you with a smile.” 

Now he was smiling undercover; was raising his hand to her reflexively, a _bon voyage_ wish, when it was caught in a woman’s hand and tugged towards the floor.

Benedict’s blood gave his heart a jolt. This - this very tug - was what had always driven his dealings with women. It could have been that, a second son, he had grown more pliant to his mother’s voice than the future Viscount Bridgerton. Or that his whimsy craved what Dr Swift, another contrary soul, had once praised in his Vanessa as _seeds long unknown to womankind_ \- just as it craved the soft-eyed, sensitive men in Benedict’s entourage. This assumed guidance, this firmness of steer, was how Genevieve and Lucy had won him over two months ago. Now Benedict was letting a woman in a long scarlet cloak, a scarlet mask and a golden devil’s prong engage him in a minuet.

“Doesn’t this bother you?” he asked while she beat the time lightly with the prong. She was as tall as he was, he noticed with a frisson of excitement. “It must be pretty awkward in a waltz.”

“Awkward?” The woman’s - no, the lady’s voice was low and cultured: another velvet glove cast in iron. Benedict could have sworn he’d heard its good-humoured note before, muted as it was by her mask. “Is this your usual opening gambit to your dance partners?”

“I - no!” Flustered, Benedict missed a bounce - this was the English minuet, a livelier affair than its French cousin. He yielded. She led. 

“I’d expected honey, Mister Bee, not a sting.”

“Upon my word, Ma’am, I did not mean…”

“Trust me, I know how to acquit myself with a rod as much as Lady Whistledown.”

With her free hand she lifted the handle of her prong and let it fall to the floor in exact synchrony with the fiddlers’ bows as they fell to the strings. It stirred Benedict in that secret place on the edge between flesh and soul: his pulse, getting swollen and excited as it did any time Benedict gave over the hang of an erotic matter to a partner. 

“My humble pardon,” he murmured. The dance was calling for a change of hands, and as the golden rod travelled from one gloved palm to the next, Benedict felt himself flush. He placed his own palm to hers and looked into her eyes, their naked burnt gold and nerves. There was a blurred familiarity to the glow; a _je ne sais quoi_ that rushed him into another dizzy, daring step. 

“Shall I do penance, then, and kiss the rod?“

“Well said,” was the only, equivocal reply. 

The dance went on, a multi-legged mêlée that tensed and relaxed, brought them close only to part their bodies again in a cycle of eternally frustrated junction. The walls of the opera went past them, one by one, first, as they walked and whirled, then a brilliant merry-go-round. And the closer Benedict got, the closest he wanted to be to the strong lines of her throat, the umber firmness of her skin that his fancy chased further down, to the waist under his hand and the legs under that swishing curtain of silk. The last flourish dropped, and so, reluctantly, did his embrace at her waist.

But she inclined the golden rod between them, and, the heat of pleasure flooding his face, he moved his lips along its hard line. 

The lady curtsied imperceptibly. When Benedict opened his eyes again, she was gone. The enchantment was over.

* * *

He could not forget her.

The next morning saw him an early partaker of breakfast. He had, in fact, ridden home soon after midnight - the ball had felt lackluster with one less devil-may-care dancer. Benedict had spent a choppy night tossing on his bed, his lips tingling with a phantom touch and his virile membrum so unruly he had to beat it twice into submission. He had risen at dawn, washed himself in cold water from toe to dishevelled top, and joined the family for tea and rolls.

“My dear, where _were_ you last night?”

“Brother, weren’t you supposed to join me at the Club?”

“Opera,” said Benedict, shushing two birds with one word. Anthony gave him a plaintive gaze before redirecting it to his roll; their mother pursed her lips. 

“The Opera ball! Oh! Oh, Benedict, was it magnificent? Did you dance with a ballerina?”

“Not if she valued her toes,” Eloise told the butter. (Benedict let it pass. Eloise was currently in the throes of finding herself a nom de plume other than that of “a dead nun who wrote stupid love letters to a dead monk”. It made her temper a little cranky.)

“Did they sing? Did you? Was there sherbet? Oh! Were the dance cards in Italian?”

“Hyacinth, that’s quite enough,” her mother said, rescuing Benedict from the pang born of Anthony’s dejected face. He knew that his brother had spent the night martyring himself with smiles and footwork at a public ball, while his heart was at the Opera. “And is that kitchen string? You are _not_ to put up your hair, young lady, if I told you once...”

This, Benedict thought while his mother scolded, sighed, and smiled across her sigh. This was his predicament, that he could not renounce home, not when his love for them warmed the very tea in his cup. Try as he might, he could not sign himself over to Granville’s bohemian lifestyle, or Genevieve’s day-to-day spirit. All he could do was hover, one foot among the free thinkers, one under the tea table, while he fought Gregory for the last brioche. “... her portrait. Benedict? Benedict, are you hearing me?”

“I'm sorry, what?”

“Lady Danbury expects you at eleven. Don’t you recall? She wants a silhouette portrait, and I said you would oblige.”

“Oh,” Benedict said in turn, startled by a sudden elevation of spirits. Lady Danbury was formidable, but she was never boring. She was, possibly, the one person he could trust with a glimpse of the Predicament. And she (thank the Lord) wanted a silhouette, not a full-fledged bust portrait. 

“I expect this is cat lap to you,” Lady Danbury said two hours later. Benedict had changed his necktie but left his hair dishevelled: he was, after all, an artist. “But the Queen wants a gallery of our profiles, don’t ask me why, and I thought you might want the practice.”

“With all gladness, Lady D.”

“Good! Let us begin. Shall I keep my seat near the window, Mister B.?”

Benedict, opening his portfolio, froze. He raised his eyes slowly, but she had already taken the pose, her finely chiselled nose and chin fringed with the sunlight as she looked past him. He shook himself mentally; took up his charcoals.

She had excellent bone structure. He drew her slowly, marvelling at the clean arch of her eyebrow and the pure lioness line of her forehead and nose. She had always been a presence, but she had never been a _face_ to him until today. He nearly pulled his chair up to catch her eye, then remembered that it would be blacked out by the ink, like her expression. A pity, really. She had more intensity in repose than ten young Misses in a romp, Benedict told himself.

“No prettifying, mind you,” came from the sitter. “I’m a devil for fidelity.”

Again Benedict started. Again he tackled her outline - wondering, should he go near her, if he would find that her dark eye glowed like the sun. 

“... Will you settle for handsome?” 

“A handsome devil? I like the stamp of that phrase. It was not made for my sex, but I never let that define me. Did you?”

She had never spoken to him so truly, so directly, and he felt himself dazed by it. Dazed, and yet unfazed. She had been a friend to him long before today’s strange scene: so many times she had stood by him at a ball or a public function, shielding him from ennui with her lively talk. She could be diabolical, indeed - 

His mind, well aware that she had been leading him, word after word, froze. Slowly, carefully, he drew the last coil of hair guarding her neck. 

Then he rose and joined her at the window.

She took the sketch in her gloved hands and perused it, while he felt as if he was sinking and rising from his own heartbeat. Could she hear it? The blood was up in him; he knew it, felt the scalding, flagellating rush on his naked face and his covered groin. He had no idea what was happening. The only straw to be grasped, in this sudden topsy-turvy of sensation, was that he had felt this before - upon opening Granville’s door to find him in a strange embrace. Like then, like now: facing a sea-change in his vision of a friend, and feeling no confusion - no shame by proxy - only the hot wish to embrace the sea and let its tide carry him where it willed. Granville loved another, and Benedict had resigned himself to standing on the shore, an observer. But this, this fanciful, unrealistic merging of yesterday’s woman and...

“A good likeness,” she said, smiling up at him, pat when he said, “I don’t.”

“You... don’t?”

“I don’t want to be defined. By - anything, any _do_ , or _don’t_ , unless I choose to obey it.” He paused. She was seated, and he stood over her, but when she looked up he saw the gold and the nerves. “In matters of desire.”

“I see.” She paused, and he found that he was trembling - not palpably, but enough that her pause felt like kindness, a respite granted and accepted. “There is one more thing I desire you to do, in fact.”

“Your command is my deepest wish.”

“Well said, Benedictus.” She smiled again, and he stared at her lips, entranced. How had he ever mistaken her for a dowager? “Turn over a fresh leaf, boy. I want you to draw my hands.”

She lifted her hands from her lap. “And draw them in the flesh.”

The great fevered thirst did not go; if anything, it surged when he took her hands in his, felt their gloved weight again. Slowly, with a painter’s exact touch, he pulled each fingertip of silk away from the solid fingers and let the glove glide away from her wrist. Only now did it strike him odd, that she should have worn it with a morning gown. 

“Will you tell me something?” he heard himself asking, as he took off her second glove. Her hands were warm and solid, anchoring him. Far away he heard a riot of violins, giddy and gay.

“What would you know?”

“Why do you use a cane, Lady Danbury?”

Silence. The fear traversed him, sharp and foolish, that he’d displeased her. But she squeezed his fingers and said, “Once, a long time ago, I loved someone. She was sensitive, like you; she was soul and obedience. She gave that obedience to a man who abused it until it bled her dry, my Sarah, under my very eyes. They buried her, and I went to her funeral in a blood-red gown. I never wore white again, unless to please the Queen.”

Benedict thought of the reds and purples that had charmed his eyes long before they turned to art. Garnet and claret, carmine and burgundy, sharp, wine-like hues, all of them speaking out as Granville’s anger had in a latter day. _It takes courage to_ …

“And I took the beau’s cane and made it mine, the male token of office. Most of them have no idea. Are content to think it an old woman’s prop. You did, too, I wager. Never mind - _I_ know better. Am I frightening you?”

“No,” Benedict said. He had retrieved his chair and pulled it close at her motion, so close that his knees brushed her morning gown. She held her hands up so they were fringed with sunlight, their umber neatness all his.

Hands were the devil to sketch, as Benedict had found over and over again. But he had fallen into a trance, and now he found that all he had to do was close his mind and let the charcoal connect with the beautiful sinews, the long expressive fingers. He wondered if she had taught Simon the hand shadows which had delighted Hyacinth and Gregory all summer long. And he thought back to the red-gloved fingers of yesterday’s woman, and how they had curved around her rod of gold. He knew the thought was raising a hard line of lust inches only from their joined knees, but he was past the shame.

He did her command and drew her hands while she held them in the air, falcon-like, curving and straightening her fingers in turn. They were as close to his mouth as to his busy hands. Benedict’s mind, freed from the page, kissed for his mouth. He could no more stop the hot tumble of images than he could have stopped the Opera fiddles, and if he could, he wouldn’t have - not when his lava fancy showed him kneeling before Lady Danbury and feeling the solidness of her palm cupping his chin, her thumb sealing his lips. He would be silent. He would kiss each of her fingers as he’d kissed Lucy’s that night, opening his mouth to them and laving their length to ease their entrance into a more secret channel, until those long brown fingers could find - but only after they’d made him wait, poised and powerful, dispensing the lightest, maddening tickle of touch to his sensitized flesh - the key to his repressed, bridled self. 

He quickened his charcoals, wasting paper, drawing and shading and aggrandizing until her hands covered all of the leaf. He thought of being naked for her. He thought of her hands over him, breaking him down to the last plane and curve only to build him up, an artist and a free man; only to reassure him that, like her, he _could_ have a foot in both spheres. 

Thought of entrusting the sum of himself to her, unbridledly.

Thought of her hands’ vigour, thought of the privilege that came with letting him taste of their strength. His face flushed, his lips open, he knew she was looking and he did not turn his face away, dedicating to her every sensation that resurfaced on it. They were hers, if she would have them - would handle them at her will, down to that last, shameless visual of himself stripped and laid down on her magnificent bed, muffled with his own necktie, his buttocks exposed to the caprice of her hand. He thought of her hands clasping the long scarlet gloves, their warmth a promise of more sensation in the bed’s penumbra. They swished in her grasp, the gloves, as her cloak had swished in the reel of that dance, and he was already begging to kiss them and the hand that knew how to turn silk into sting. She let him, and then she made the silk whistle again, and again, until he thrashed and cried out under the effervescent burn, and once he’d been made tender, not the cynic he feared to be, she kneaded his flesh, hot and sensitized, with both hands until he surrendered. “Please,” he said, and she kissed his mouth, before she untied him and placed his wrists round her neck.

He only realized he had stopped drawing when she took the charcoal from between his fingers, gently, and laid it on his lap.

“Beautiful,” she said, her praise another distilled heat. “You’ve done so well, dear boy. You have the artist’s passion and the artist’s humility, and I shall see to it that when your talent blooms, it will be treated as it deserves. Now, will you do one last thing for me? I’ve left my cane in the next parlour, against the wall corner. Will you be so good as to fetch it?”

He nodded, too spent to trust himself with the spoken word. He walked past the door not seeing it, but when he approached the wall, he flinched alert. Her cane stood there, looking the same as on any other day, its slender black shaft nestled in the corner. But it had company. Also there, also erect, stood the golden rod.

He was being given a choice, Benedict knew. It was the lioness who had taken his hand the night before, but it was the carer, the friend, the safekeeper who was waiting in the next room. Who, according to his choice, would never mention the matter again, or lay bare to him what will and invention could truly do.

He bowed to the cane, a half smile on his lips. Then, taking the golden rod, he straightened his shoulders and, with his head held high, walked back into the drawing-room.


End file.
